Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez (; February 29, 1960 – June 7, 2013), better known as Richard Ramirez, was an American serial killer, sex offender, and burglar whose killing spree occurred in Greater Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area in the state of California. From April 1984 to August 1985, Ramirez murdered at least fifteen people during various break-ins. With his crimes usually taking place after dark, Ramirez was dubbed the Night Stalker, the Walk-In Killer, and the Valley Intruder. He was convicted and sentenced to death in 1989 and died while awaiting execution in 2013. Ramirez's crimes were heavily influenced by a troubled childhood. Frequently abused by his father, he developed brain damage and started abusing drugs at the age of 10. He began developing interests in the macabre in his early and mid-teens from his older cousin, a Vietnam War veteran with schizophrenia and PTSD, who extensively bragged about the war crimes he had committed, and who killed his wife in front of Ramirez when Ramirez was 15. Ramirez learned military skills from him that he later employed during his killing spree. He cultivated a strong interest in Satanism and the occult. By the time he had left his home in Texas and moved to California at the age of 22, Ramirez frequently used cocaine. He often committed burglaries to support his drug addiction, many of which were later frequently accompanied by murders, attempted murders, rapes, attempted rapes and battery. The murder spree terrorized the residents of Greater Los Angeles and later the San Francisco Bay Area over the course of fourteen months. His first known murder occurred as early as April 1984; this crime was not connected to Ramirez, nor was it known to be his doing, until 2009. Ramirez used a wide variety of weapons, including handguns, various types of knives, a machete, a tire iron, and a claw hammer. He punched, pistol-whipped, and strangled many of his victims, both manually with his hands, and in one instance a ligature; stomped at least one victim to death in her sleep; and tortured another by shocking her with a live electrical cord. Ramirez also frequently enjoyed degrading and humiliating his victims, especially those who survived his attacks or whom he explicitly decided not to kill. In 1989, Ramirez was convicted of thirteen counts of murder, five attempted murders, eleven sexual assaults, and fourteen burglaries. The judge who upheld his nineteen death sentences remarked that his deeds exhibited "cruelty, callousness, and viciousness beyond any human understanding". Ramirez never expressed any remorse for his crimes. He died in June 2013 of complications from B-cell lymphoma while awaiting execution at San Quentin State Prison.
Early life and education
Childhood Ricardo Leyva Muñoz Ramirez was born in El Paso, Texas, on February 29, 1960, to Mexican immigrants Mercedes Muñoz and Julián Tapia Ramirez, the youngest of their five children. His father, a railway laborer, was a violent alcoholic who was prone to fits of anger that often resulted in physical abuse towards the household. Ramirez was brought up a Catholic. He began smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol at the age of 10. Psychiatrist Michael Stone describes Ramirez as a "made" psychopath as opposed to a "born" psychopath. He says that Ramirez's schizoid personality disorder contributed to his indifference to the suffering of his victims and his untreatability. Stone stated that Ramirez was knocked unconscious and almost died on multiple occasions before he was six years old, and as a result "later developed temporal lobe epilepsy, aggressivity, and hypersexuality". At age 12, Ramirez was taken under the wing of his older cousin, Miguel "Mike" Valles, a soldier in the U.S. Army who himself had become a serial killer and rapist during his service in the Vietnam War. Valles often boasted of committing gruesome war crimes in Vietnam, and shared Polaroid photos with Ramirez showing Vietnamese women whom he had raped, murdered, and dismembered or decapitated. It is alleged that many of these photos depicted women being tied to trees or wooden posts both before and after they were sexually assaulted and killed by Valles. Ramirez later stated while incarcerated that he was fascinated, rather than repulsed, by the images and stories Valles shared with him. Valles taught Ramirez some of his military skills, including stealth and kill tactics. Around this time, Ramirez began to seek escape from his father's violent temper by sleeping in a local cemetery. His father often tied him to a crucifix in a cemetery overnight as punishment.
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